This workshop focuses on how to load, clean, and restructure your data into a form suitable for summarizing in graphs and tables, and ready for your final analyses. We will use functions from the 'tidyverse' R packages to realize the key preparation steps in any empirical data analysis: data import, variable cleaning and construction, wide-to-long / long-to-wide transformations, joining data frames (a.k.a. 'merging'), and creating grouped summaries. Time permitting we will also introduce some basic visualization.

Prerequisites

The workshop assumes that you have (or have in the past had) moderate proficiency with base R. Any R-using undergraduate course, e.g. POL 345 or any part of the graduate Politics methods sequence is sufficient, though not necessary. In particular, do not be concerned if your R is rusty. Not only will we introduce the necessary package tools from scratch, but you will discover they have become rather more friendly since you last looked...

Audience

This workshop is open to anyone interested in gaining or updating their data manipulation skills in R. It should be of particular relevance to those writing a thesis, providing research assistance, or doing postdoctoral research, but simple curiosity about contemporary R works too.

Registration

If you plan to attend, please send email to [email protected], so we can make sure the room is the right size.

Materials: wrangling.zip